Awakening eBook

III

AT ROBIN HILL

Jolyon Forsyte had spent his boy’s nineteenth
birthday at Robin Hill, quietly going into his affairs.
He did everything quietly now, because his heart
was in a poor way, and, like all his family, he disliked
the idea of dying. He had never realised how
much till one day, two years ago, he had gone to his
doctor about certain symptoms, and been told:

“At any moment, on any overstrain.”

He had taken it with a smile—­the natural
Forsyte reaction against an unpleasant truth.
But with an increase of symptoms in the train on the
way home, he had realised to the full the sentence
hanging over him. To leave Irene, his boy, his
home, his work—­though he did little enough
work now! To leave them for unknown darkness,
for the unimaginable state, for such nothingness that
he would not even be conscious of wind stirring leaves
above his grave, nor of the scent of earth and grass.
Of such nothingness that, however hard he might try
to conceive it, he never could, and must still hover
on the hope that he might see again those he loved!
To realise this was to endure very poignant spiritual
anguish. Before he reached home that day he had
determined to keep it from Irene. He would have
to be more careful than man had ever been, for the
least thing would give it away and make her as wretched
as himself, almost. His doctor had passed him
sound in other respects, and seventy was nothing of
an age—­he would last a long time yet, if
he could.

Such a conclusion, followed out for nearly two years,
develops to the full the subtler side of character.
Naturally not abrupt, except when nervously excited,
Jolyon had become control incarnate. The sad
patience of old people who cannot exert themselves
was masked by a smile which his lips preserved even
in private. He devised continually all manner
of cover to conceal his enforced lack of exertion.

Mocking himself for so doing, he counterfeited conversion
to the Simple Life; gave up wine and cigars, drank
a special kind of coffee with no coffee in it.
In short, he made himself as safe as a Forsyte in
his condition could, under the rose of his mild irony.
Secure from discovery, since his wife and son had
gone up to Town, he had spent the fine May day quietly
arranging his papers, that he might die to-morrow
without inconveniencing any one, giving in fact a final
polish to his terrestrial state. Having docketed
and enclosed it in his father’s old Chinese
cabinet, he put the key into an envelope, wrote the
words outside: “Key of the Chinese cabinet,
wherein will be found the exact state of me, J. F.,”
and put it in his breast-pocket, where it would be
always about him, in case of accident. Then, ringing
for tea, he went out to have it under the old oak-tree.

All are under sentence of death; Jolyon, whose sentence
was but a little more precise and pressing, had become
so used to it that he thought habitually, like other
people, of other things. He thought of his son
now.